Marketing data analytics is often seen as limited to website performance such as traffic, bounce rate, or unique visitors, but measuring the overall effectiveness of marketing efforts can be much more complex and represents a challenge. challenge.
Indeed, website analysis can provide a lot of data and information related to the technical performance of your website, but marketers need much richer data to understand the performance of their marketing campaigns, what web analytics only cannot bring.
The difference between web analytics and marketing data analytics
Web analytics measure important data for a webmaster, such as the loading time of pages, the pages viewed at each visit and the time spent on the site.
Marketing data analysis, on the other hand, measure performance indicators such as traffic, the number of leads generated and the number of sales or customers. It also allows you to study which events, on or off your website, influence prospects to become, or not, customers. It includes data not only from your website, but also from other sources such as e-mails, social networks, and even offline events. He is usually interested in the lead environment, while web analytics typically consider the page as the unit of measure in his reports.
With marketing analytics, marketers can understand the effectiveness of their marketing, not just the effectiveness of their website. They can identify how each of their marketing initiatives compares to others, determine the true ROI of their business, and understand how they are achieving their goals.
With the information gathered from marketing analytics, they can also discover weaknesses in specific channels and adjust their strategies and tactics to improve their overall marketing program.
Measuring efficiency: a challenge for marketers
According to the report on the state of inbound marketing, 40% of marketers have difficulty proving the ROI of their marketing campaigns.
The web analytics is the main measurement tool used to evaluate the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, but this is not enough to establish the ROI of a marketing campaign.
Marketing data analysis is still little used, probably because of a lack of cohesion.
Indeed, most marketers need to set up different marketing analytics platforms to gather all the necessary data, understand their marketing performance and make informed decisions.
They collect data on their e-mailing campaign thanks to the analytical tools offered by their email service provider, information on their performance on social networks through a monitoring tool, analyzes on their blog via their blogging platform, etc.
This process is tedious, so it is not surprising that marketers focus primarily on tools like Google Analytics and have difficulty measuring the effectiveness of their marketing.
Why are marketing data analytics so important?
Web analytics does not offer enough information and its data is not enough for marketers.
Marketing goes far beyond your website. It’s by intersecting the interactions between your marketing channels and the results on the other side that you will get the most information about your marketing.
You can spend countless hours reviewing and analyzing the data in your web analytics tools, comparing new visitors to recurring visitors month after month, but in the end, you will not achieve a deep understanding of the performance of your web analytics. your marketing. Here’s how marketing analytics can fill that gap.
Read more about the top 5 data analytics tools for 2018
What marketing analytics can offer you
1 – Integration within different marketing channels
Marketing analytics provide you with a reliable and solid insight into the direct relationships established between your marketing channels. It is very interesting to be able to evaluate the performance of each channel (social networks, the blog, your e-mail marketing, the SEO, etc.) but the real power of analysis comes into play when you can easily link performance different channels.
Suppose you have sent an email to some of your prospects via your segmented list. Marketing analysis can tell you how many people have clicked on a link in your email to reach your website, but also how many of them have actually become leads once on your site.
2 – Data centered on the person and the life cycle of the customer – KNOWING THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER
Marketing analysis allows you to know how a single lead arrives on your website for the first time, if this lead is part of your subscribers to your newsletter, if he often clicks on the marketing offers proposed by email and well ‘other information.
It will provide you with an extremely useful survey intelligence that you can apply to marketing initiatives such as lead nurturing.
In addition, studying all this aggregated information will help you understand the trends in your leads and leads, as well as determine which marketing activities offer the best-added value during the different stages of your sales cycle.
You may discover that many customers have reached their point of conversion on one or more specific marketing offers. This data will give you the opportunity to set up an effective lead management process, which will allow you to rate and prioritize your prospects, and identify activities that help create qualified prospects for your business.
Learn more about the voice of customer tools
3 – Closed-loop data
The most attractive feature of marketing analytics is its ability to link marketing activities to sales. Your blog is probably effective at generating traffic and leads, but do they turn into customers and increase your revenue?
Closed loop marketing analytics can answer this question. All you need to do is connect your marketing analytics system to your CRM .
This closed-loop data will help you determine whether each of your marketing initiatives really contributes to your overall strategy. You will be able to know which channels are the most important to increase your sales. You may learn that your blog is the most effective channel for generating customers or, conversely, that social networks only function as a commitment mechanism, but not as a source of sales.
What you can get with marketing analytics
The information and data gathered by a marketing analytics tool are only useful if you use it. The true value of analysis is not just to prove to your manager that your marketing activities are getting enough results to justify your time and budget.
It can also help you improve and optimize your marketing performance, based on each channel, but also within a global system that includes all your channels.
This article introduces you to some of the ways you can use analytics, but you’ll get more results by using them wisely. By relying solely on web analytics, you miss out on a set of vital data that can help you optimize your marketing strategy.
By evaluating the analytics tools for your business, whether it’s HubSpot’s analytics tools or other platforms, make sure they offer marketing analytics features, not just of the website.
However, for the data to be useful, it must be interpreted and presented in a convincing way. Thats why it becomes important to have a proper understanding of the data visualization tools and top data preparation tools. These skills are essential for the development of a career and a business.
Read more about the free data visualization tools